Amazon says it’s delivering more packages in one day or less after overhauling delivery network
An Amazon driver loads packages into a delivery van at an Amazon delivery station on November 28, 2022 in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Amazon has for years been marching toward making same-day and next-day delivery the standard for members of its Prime loyalty club.
On Monday, the company said it reached a major milestone in those efforts. Amazon said so far this year it’s delivered 1.8 billion units to U.S. Prime members the same or next day, roughly four times what it delivered at those speeds by this point in 2019.
For the past four years, Amazon has poured money and resources into revamping its warehouse and delivery network to shorten shipping times from two days to one day or less. Those efforts hit a snag during the Covid pandemic due to supply chain and labor-market challenges, but normal delivery speeds have largely returned as a result of new warehouses coming online and other improvements to the company’s operations.
Amazon says it achieved its “fastest Prime speeds ever” last quarter.
One of the company’s biggest changes in the past year is a shift away from a national “hub and spoke” fulfillment network, where packages might travel through several facilities across the country, said Udit Madan, Amazon’s vice president of transportation, in an interview. The company moved to a model in which the country is divided into eight smaller regions, with local facilities that stock commonly ordered items.
Fast delivery is notoriously expensive and logistically challenging, and companies typically lose money on deliveries. But Amazon’s change cut costs and boosted delivery speeds, Madan said.
“Our fastest speeds tend to be our most economical,” he said.
Driving fewer miles and requiring fewer handoffs has reduced Amazon’s “cost to serve,” Madan added. Amazon says it’s cut the distance items are traveling from warehouses to customers by 15%, and lowered the number of “touchpoints,” or how many times a package is handled, by 12%.
The company has also seen improvements in its machine-learning technology that allows it to better plan where and how much inventory is placed in warehouses, hastening delivery times. Across the top 60 U.S. metro areas, Amazon says more than half of Prime orders arrived the same or next day.
Speedier delivery has pushed shoppers to purchase more items from Amazon than they might normally buy from their local corner store, or big-box retailers like Best Buy.
“We’ve consistently seen that as we’re offering faster speeds, we’re actually expanding the consideration set that customers think of us for when they’re thinking about their purchases,” Madan said. “What we’re seeing is greater engagement and more purchases from customers.”
Amazon is rolling out more so-called “same-day sites,” or smaller buildings located closer to large metro areas where the company fulfills, sorts and delivers products from a single location. It has traditionally operated distinct facilities for these purposes, meaning separate fulfillment centers, sort centers and delivery stations.
Same-day sites are stocked with a rotating selection of millions of items tailored to what customers are purchasing in the area, whereas a typical warehouse is much larger and may have a more random assortment of products.
Amazon plans to double the number of same-day sites in its network over the next two years, Madan said.
The company declined to share how many same-day sites it maintains. The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon has opened approximately 45 facilities since 2019, citing data from MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm that closely tracks Amazon’s distribution network.
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Charges against Jeffrey Epstein were announced on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon are among those who appeared in partially redacted files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Friday by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.
The committee earlier embarked on a probe to evaluate whether the federal government mishandled its case against Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence following a 2022 conviction for recruiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
President Donald Trump had promised voters on the campaign trail that he would release government documents related to Epstein, who was arrested in the summer of 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died in a New York federal prison, reportedly by suicide, before trial.
However, Trump has refused to endorse the release of any Epstein files since returning to the White House in January, and Republicans in Congress have followed his lead, keeping the documents out of the public’s view.
Democrats in the committee on Friday released redacted pages from a new batch of files they obtained through their probe without giving their Republican peers advanced notice. They were rebuked for the move.
In a statement on Friday, the committee said that the batch included 8,544 documents in response to a subpoena in August, and that, “Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.”
The latest batch of documents received by the committee from the Justice Department contained itineraries and notes by Epstein memorializing invitations he’d sent, trips he’d planned and meetings he’d booked with tech and business leaders.
Demonstrators gather for a press conference calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files outside the United States Captiol on Wednesday September 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
One of the itineraries indicated that Epstein expected Musk to make a trip to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Dec. 6, 2014, but then asked “is this still happening?”
Musk told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had visited Epstein’s New York City mansion and that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island,” but the Tesla CEO had declined.
In June, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Trump was mentioned in previously released court documents from the Epstein case, but has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.
Musk started the year leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to slash the size of the federal government and reduce the power of various regulatory agencies. He left DOGE in May, and he and the president proceeded to hurl insults at each other in public over a number of disagreements.
However, Trump and Musk remain close enough that they sat together at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk earlier this month after the right-wing activist was assassinated while speaking at a university in Utah.
The partially redacted files also indicated Epstein had breakfast with Bannon on Feb. 16, 2019, and lunch with investor Peter Thiel on Nov. 27, 2017. Bannon is a long-time Trump ally, and Thiel was a major backer of Trump ahead of the 2016 election who spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The files also mentioned that Epstein booked a “tentative breakfast party” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, historically a supporter of Democrats, in December 2014.
Musk, Thiel, Bannon and Gates weren’t immediately available for comment.
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